Making music at Bristol Old Vic

When the theatre opened on the 30th May 1766 it didn’t have a Royal Licence. This meant it was illegal to perform drama. 

Early performances were advertised as concerts of "Music and a Specimen of Rhetorick" instead. 

The theatre attracted world musical class talent from the start. 

The celebrated Bohemian piano virtuoso and composer Isaac Ignaz Moscheles performed here in 1825. 

In the mid-eighteenth century the theatre's managers would pay sailors from Bristol’s docks to perform a hornpipe at the end of the evening. 

In 1847 a visit by the celebrated Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind whipped the "sober citizens of Bristol" into a frenzy. 

Local newspapers reported on "a number of our most eminent inhabitants crushing each other almost to death for the purpose of paying £1 for tickets". 

In the 1860s the Grand English Opera Company staged costumed concert performances of operas without a chorus. This made it much cheaper for the company to tour to the provinces.

Opera proved so popular that by the 1920s the theatre was programming an entire opera season each year. 

In 1926 performances were enhanced by the presence of a "contingent of the City of Birmingham Orchestra". 

Les Ballets Nègres was Europe's first black dance company, founded in 1946 by Jamaican dancers Berto Pasuka and Ritchie Riley. 

The English composer Leonard Salzedo was closely involved with the group, and Salzedo wrote four scores for them for piano, tom tom and maracas. 

Salad Days, the hit musical by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, premiered here  in June 1954. It soon transferred to London, and became the longest running musical in West End history (though, sadly, it’s since been overtaken).

Inspired by hugely popular promenade concerts staged in the 1840s, which drew people from all corners of Bristol to listen to the music of Mozart, Weber and Rossini, the theatre hosted the Bristol Proms between 2013 and 2015.

Musicians like Daniel Hope and Nicola Benedetti helped recover the interactive spontaneity of classical music and bent it into fantastical new shapes. 

In 2021 the powerful poetics of Malaika Kegode and electrifying music of Bristol band Jakabol were brought together in Outlier, a moving, autobiographical gig-theatre show. 

In 2021 Olivier Award-winning star of Hamilton Giles Terera  performed his song cycle Black Matter, as part of the theatre's Courtyard Sessions. 

Would you like to be a part of this incredible musical legacy? 

Our community choir brings music and theatre together to create a sense of community through singing. 

Check our website for information about joining.